Alibi Junior High (14 page)

I smile. I’m starting to appreciate Mrs. Owens’s sense of humor. It grows on you. She’ll never do stand-up but it can work well with a small captive audience of one.

“Do I get a trophy?”

She raises her eyebrows. That’s about as close to a smile as you’ll ever receive from her. “No, but that’s an interesting idea. Something to take into consideration.”

“Um, Mrs. Owens, may I say something about Coach Dinatelli’s complaint?”

She holds up her hand. “Let me finish reading it.” She reads through the page. Her eyes rise briefly. “Coach Blowhard?”

“Well, it’s like—”

She stops me again with her hand and continues to read.

When she finishes, she places the sheet of paper in a growing file with my name on it. “What class do you have now, Mr. Saron?”

“Um, Spanish.”

“See Miss Reed at the front desk for a late pass.”

I stand up. “But what about the complaint?”

She walks around her desk and holds open the door for me. “Sometimes, the underdog wins.”

“So, I’m not in trouble?”

“Not today.” Her eyebrows rise. “At least, not yet. You still have a few hours left.”

W
ere you in the woods last night?”

Andy signals that I should lower my voice. He’s worried about bugs, but I point at the CD player; it’s loudly pumping out music. It would be impossible to record anything while it’s blasting.

Still, when he talks his voice is so low I can barely hear it. “I was out early in the evening—was that you that I heard around midnight?”

I shake my head. “No. You heard it too?”

“How could I not? Our friend is getting loud. For some reason that worries me.”

“I know what you mean.”

Andy gestures that I should follow him and we walk across the gym to the storage closet. He squats down and opens a box. I peer inside. “What is it?”

He grins and talks almost directly into my ear. “I called an old buddy of mine. I think it’s time we start fighting fire with fire. It’s a wireless camera of our own, two of them actually, with night-vision capacity, and this is a silent driveway alarm system. We can set it up in the woods. When he trips the beam we’ll know where he is.”

Now it’s my turn to grin. “Now you’re talking.”

H
ey, guys.” I place my lunch tray at the end of the table. Most of the karate club is here. We’ve fallen into the habit of sitting at the same table everyday.

“Cody! I’ve got to ask you something.”

Why does Pogo Stick always talk with a mouth full of food? I turn my head slightly so I don’t have to look at the contents of his lunch. “What’s up?”

“Frank tells me you’ve got a thing for Renee Carrington, that right?”

I look at my plate and start moving things around with my fork. I can feel my face getting hot. I hope it’s not turning red. “I don’t know.”

He slaps Bop on the back. “Ha! Told ya. That’s a yes.”

I plead with Pogo. “Come on. Give me a break.”

“Hey, I’m not giving you a hard time. Renee’s cute. Is she going to the dance next week?”

“Um…I don’t know.”

Pogo thinks for a moment, then calls across the table, “Frank, Frank.” He’s talking with the Gomez brothers about the World Series. “Frank!”

Frank looks over at us. “What?”

“Renee Carrington’s friend. The little redheaded thing.”

“You mean Fiona?”

“Yeah, that’s it, Fiona. She lives on your street, right?”

Frank takes a sip of his milk. “Yeah, like three houses down. Nice girl.”

“She at your bus stop?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Could you ask her if Renee’s going to the dance?”

He shrugs. “Sure, why not.”

Pogo turns to me and smiles. “There you are. I bet she’ll be there.”

I push around my food for a while before confessing. “I’ve never been to a dance before. What are they like?”

“What are they like? It’s time for you to get out of your cave. Hang with us. We’ll be over by the clock.”

C
ody, I wanted to catch you before history.”

Renee’s standing in the hall with the oddest expression. I can’t get a read on it. I look into her eyes: she seems nervous. I think she has bad news.

“Something wrong?”

“No. Well, kinda. I just want to ask you something.”

“What?”

She touches my shoulder. “Not here, okay? But I want to know if I can drop by your house tomorrow. You’ve got your karate club going on, right?”

Why did she touch my shoulder? That’s the type of thing you do when you feel sorry for someone. Maybe she thinks I’ve been getting too friendly. Maybe she wants me to back off. Did Frank say something to her?

“Cody?”

“Huh?”

“So…can I? Can I stop by?”

“Yes, of course. Stop by anytime. Vegetarians are always welcome.”

She’s not even smiling. This has got to be really bad news.

T
he worst part of waking up in the morning is the getting-out-of-bed part. Not that I’ve got anything against getting out of bed; it’s perfectly fine if that’s what you choose to do.

Today it’s easy to get out of bed. Today, I can smell Jenny’s pancakes. When she whips up and fries that batter, creating those delicious little golden cakes, now
that’s
something I choose to get out of bed for.

I hurry into the kitchen. “Mmmm, something smells great and it’s not even the weekend. I love it!”

Jenny’s wearing an old pair of sweats, huge slippers that look like furry feet, and a New York Mets baseball cap.

“Hey, I thought you were a Yankees fan.”

“I told you that was just a hat. I picked this hat up because you said you hated the Yankees. Tonight’s the big night. Game seven. Whoever wins tonight will be the champs, so…let’s go, Mets!”

I wave my finger in the air, aggravation slipping into my voice. “
Ooooh!
Ask me if I care. Really, what is it with people around here? You’d think the fate of the free world depended on this stupid game.”

Jenny holds up her hands. “Whoa…put that monster back
in its box. People work hard, if they want a little diversion, what’s the big deal?”

“I guess.”

She sits down next to me. “Guess what? Your mother loved baseball.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, we used to go to the games with our dad. I had a good time but your mom…she loved it.”

“What was her favorite team?”

She smiles. “I think it was the Mets, but she’d go to any game. Mainly she just loved going to the ballpark, you know, the hot dogs, the ice cream…the boys.”

Jenny gives me one of those sideways glances like a shoplifter thinking she’s getting away with something. “And as long as we’re on that subject, how’s Renee?”

Her question doesn’t bother me today, and I’m about to say “fine” but instead I find myself blurting out, “I don’t know. I’m worried; she wants to talk to me about something after my karate club. I get the feeling she wants me to stop talking to her.”

She places a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. If she were going to tell you she didn’t want to talk to you, she’d just
tell
you she doesn’t want to talk. She wouldn’t make an appointment. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Think about it.”

“I guess.”

“I’m betting it’s either something good or it’s something that
has nothing to do with you. And you know what I want?”

“What?”

“When you find out, I want to be the first to know. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, eat your pancakes. How about some orange juice?”

She walks over to the refrigerator and pulls out the carton.

“Sure…. And, Jenny?” She glances over her shoulder. “Thanks for everything. You’ve been great.”

Her eyes light up. “Oh, hon, thank you. I love having you here. When you live and work by yourself you tend to get set in your ways. Thanks for making my life more…interesting.”

I
looked for Renee all day long. I was sure she was avoiding me. It wasn’t until history started and her chair remained empty that I realized she just wasn’t in school.

All through the karate class I keep one eye on the back door, expecting to see her smiling face any second. It’s all I want right now, everything else can wait. It’s so strange. There’s the café bombing and everything that followed in its path, there’s all this crazy, life-threatening stuff that I should be thinking about, but right now all I can think about is Renee.

I keep pushing the class, not wanting it to end, not wanting to give up on Renee.

“Okay!” Andy steps forward. “I think that’s enough for today.”

The guys practically collapse on the mats.

Pogo Stick moans, “Man, Cody, what are you trying to do, kill us?”

Andy starts handing out water bottles. “I think Cody wants to be a drill sergeant. He’s trying to turn all of you into lean, mean, fighting machines.”

I smile but it’s mainly to hide my embarrassment. I didn’t realize I was pushing everyone that hard. They look exhausted.

Bop guzzles his water and goes to the refrigerator for another. He twists off the top and says, “Andy, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“How’d you lose your arm?”

I can’t believe he just asked that. Maybe that’s something Andy doesn’t want to talk about. Didn’t he think about that? I glance around the room: everyone looks as uncomfortable as I feel.

“Oh, my arm? I lost it in Iraq.”

Pogo Stick surprises me by saying, “How?” Not that I blame him. I think everyone in the room wanted to say that word. He just had less self-control than the rest of us.

Andy smiles but it isn’t one of those happy smiles, it’s more of an I’ll-smile-just-because smile. “So, you want to hear a war story?”

Pogo Stick nods his head.

“Okay, then.” He lets out a long breath of air. “Let’s see, I guess you could say a teddy bear took my arm.”

I heard “teddy bear” but it didn’t really make sense to me. My
mind keeps repeating the sentence. Shuffling the words around, searching for a new meaning that makes some kind of sense.

John asks in a voice that sounds very little like his normal one, “Did you say…teddy bear?”

“Yes. We were on foot patrol in Baghdad heading back to camp and we were just at that point where you start to relax a little. Not a lot, because you never really relax, but just a little. These thoughts of what you’re going to do later start popping into your head.”

Andy takes a long pull from his water bottle. I notice that it’s shaking in his hand.

“Anyhow, we went around a corner and came upon this teddy bear lying on the sidewalk. It was…well, I guess you’d call it ‘cute,’ something you’d see back home. One of the guys went to pick it up, I told him to leave it alone but he picked it up anyway. There was this noise, it sounded like a big kid belly-flopping into a pool, followed by a really bright flash; it was like looking into the sun. It blinded me; I couldn’t see a thing.”

He stops talking. Beads of sweat are running down his forehead. He closes his eyes for a second, takes a deep breath, and pushes on with the story.

“I don’t remember much after that, just being terrified, bullets and grenades were flying all around. I was running blind, with one hand outstretched and the other on the wall of a building, feeling my way for cover until an explosion lifted me off my feet and slammed me down in a dirt alleyway.”

The room is silent. We all look at one another. Something about the way Andy told the story made me feel like I was there. I think the others felt it too. It was in his eyes. I could see the fear, the confusion, and the pain. Maybe my dad’s right: maybe it is time to try to end war.

John clears his throat. “Um, did the explosion take your arm off?”

“I was in a coma for three days. When I woke, it was gone.”

Pogo Stick asks, “Was that scary? I mean, when you woke up and realized your arm was gone.”

Andy’s quiet for a long time, just leaning against the wall, looking at the floor. I start to wonder if we might have asked him one too many questions.

Finally he looks up and says, “More than you can ever imagine.”

The room’s quiet, the CD ended long before Andy started to talk. Now the silence seems suffocating. I’d like to say something, anything, to fill this emptiness but nothing comes to mind.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

Everyone jumps, even Andy. I look at the door. Renee’s outside with a huge smile, energetically waving through the window at us.

The guys start to tease me. I think it’s mainly just something
to throw into the air, a welcome opportunity to escape from the silent aftermath of Andy’s story.

I don’t mind, I’m glad to see her and I’d rather hear a chorus of “
Oooh
, it’s Cody’s girlfriend” than the vicious silence that was just smothering us moments before.

I jog across the room and meet her outside. “Hey, I was worried you weren’t going to show up.”

She smiles. “Sorry, it’s my sister. She’s running late for everything.”

“That’s okay, at least you made it. Want to come in and say hello to the guys?”

She stops smiling. “No. Is there someplace we can go to talk? It’s kinda important.”

I try to keep an upbeat tone to my voice. I tell myself that whatever happens, no matter how bad her news is, I won’t let her see how disappointed I am.

“Sure, there’s a bench over by the apple tree.”

We walk across the backyard and sit side by side on the bench. It’s a warm fall night; the sun’s setting behind us, and the sky is a blazing canopy of colors. If I wasn’t expecting bad news this could be a perfect romantic moment.

I look into her eyes. They look so sad. “Renee, what’s the matter?”